June 2011

June 30, 2011

Here’s a fact that I’m sure will come as a shock to many of you who don’t pay attention: I’m a Native New Yorker. As a result, I have this bad habit of saying pretty much what’s on my mind.

Here’s another fact: New Yorkers have a reputation for being rude, but they’re really not. Most of them aren’t, anyway. What they are, is they’re abnormally direct with their opinions.

One time I was in Manhattan and I was downtown, in Greenwich Village, looking for Ray’s Pizza (the one on Prince Street, though I didn’t know that at the time). I asked someone for directions and he told me where it was, then said to me, “But you don’t wanna go there.”

Huh. Really. “I don’t?”

“Naw, you don’t wanna go there. You wanna go to Pizza Suprema. It’s the best in the City, up by Madison Square Garden. Try the upside-down slice.” Then he told me where the nearest train station was (you don’t say “subway” unless you’re a tourist, thanks) that would put me on the 1 or the 9 train (“don’t take the 2 or 3, they’re local trains, it’ll take you forever”) and sent me on my way.

In fact, the 2 and the 3 only add two stops between Houston and Penn Station, but what the heck. And Pizza Suprema’s upside-down slice is pretty damn good. But the point here is, New Yorkers will tell you what you want, especially when they realize you don’t know what you want.

This is something I’ve retained, even after nearly ten years in Baltimore. But I’m learning that there’s a fine line between being the guy who’s a straight shooter and being That Guy. The Straight Shooter is admired; That Guy is kind of a jerk. And I think I’ve done my time being a jerk, many many years ago. So my goal is to continue saying what I mean and not varnishing the truth too much, because it’s really not so precious a thing that nobody can look at it, but not to do it by becoming That Guy.

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I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think about the type of person you’d NEVER want to be 5 years from now. Write out your own personal recipe to prevent this from happening and commit to following it. “Thought is the seed of action.”

I’ve really been enjoying Treme, the series created by David Simon and Eric Overmeyer. Locals may remember David Simon as the guy who came up with The Wire and Homicide: Life in the Street, both of which were set in Baltimore. In addition to the music—and there’s a lot of music, even if you don’t necessarily hear most of the songs in their entirety—there are lots of stories going on that don’t necessarily intersect to any great extent.

(And let me just say that in doing some of the research for this piece, I accidentally spoiled myself for the most recent episode, which is still in my DVR and I haven’t seen yet. I’m going to blame you for that, for the time being.)

Among all this music, a specific phrase keeps popping up in lyrics. For the slower-witted among you, it’s “Jockomo feena nay”. Now I’d heard it many times in the song “Iko Iko”, of course, and as long as I’ve heard the song I figured that it was a bit of nonsense lyric, a chunk of filler; kind of like singing scat in jazz. Or, as my high school friend Joe put it recently, “I just thought it was a cool song!” (Joe was the guy who turned me on to The Doors. Yeah, he was that guy in high school. Anyway, he gets a pass because of this.) The song “Iko Iko” (as noted above) was written in 1953 by James Crawford, and at the time was just called “Jockamo”.

But as I started hearing the lyric popping up in other songs, it slowly dawned on me that this phrase might actually mean something. So I did some research, from which you now get to benefit. Everybody wins!

In addition to being a great dramatic show, Treme also has the advantage of being educational. One of the things I learned is that, come Mardi Gras, there isn’t just one parade in town, the way there is on, say, Thanksgiving in New York City. It’s more like a whole series of them all over town, and they go on forever. The whole city is a parade.

Among the paraders are the Mardi Gras Indians, who are actually several groups (which call themselves “tribes” or even “gangs”) of African-American Carnival revelers. They dress up in very elaborate outfits that are heavily influenced by Native American ceremonial garb. There are nearly 40 of these tribes, and most of them belong to one of two groups identifying themselves as “Uptown” or “Downtown” Indians. Once dressed, they will march out on the streets on Super Sunday, which for them is the Sunday prior to the Feast of St. Joseph (March 19).

About a hundred years ago, competing tribes who encountered each other in the street could conceivably erupt into violence, however this has generally reduced to verbal taunts about the quality of each others’ costumes. But as a result of this violence, certain paraders were given specific roles. The first one out is the Wild Man, who wears a horned hat and literally acts wild. His job is to clear the crowds in advance of the others. (This character wasn’t seen in Treme because he’d died in the storm; we did see his memorial service.) The Spy Boy goes out next, and literally spies out to see if other tribes are in the area. Next comes the Flag Boy, who is always in visual contact with the Spy Boy. The Flag Boy literally carries the tribe’s flag, and is the standard-bearer of the group. Last is the Big Chief, who always far outdoes the others in costumed elaborateness.

From all this we get the story behind Iko Iko. Most people know the version by the Dixie Cups, but it turns out that they were mostly just fooling around and didn’t realize they were being recorded. The producers added backing tracks and bam! Instant hit. But this is why the lyrics they’re singing don’t make a whole pile of sense (“My grandma said to your grandma…”). The song itself is about a collision between two Mardi Gras Indian parades, during which the Spy Boy threatens to burn the Flag Boy’s banner.

Part of the problem of deciphering the phrase “Jockomo feena nay” is that all spellings are approximate, and that there are numerous interpretations. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead once said that “Jockomo” derives from a Swahili word meaning roughly, “If you don’t like it, that’s your problem”, or possibly even “Go to hell”. Some have theorized that it’s a corruption of the name “Giacomo”, which they then suggest is Italian (or French) for John or Joseph. Unfortunately, it’s Italian for “James,” so that’s clearly wrong.

The fact is, the words have been used for so long that they’ve become more or less meaningless, since the original words have been swallowed up in time and repetition and garbling. The two strongest theories that follow from this take a broader meaning from the phrase itself rather than an attempt to break down individual words. Thus, “Jockomo feena nay” can mean (loosely), “It doesn’t matter what the Big Chief says” (i.e. “it’s all good”), or, perhaps more appropriately—especially in context of the song—“Don’t mess with us”.

As it happens, offBeat Magazine interviewed Crawford in 2002 and asked him about “Iko Iko”. During the interview, he said:

Crawford: It came from two Indian chants that I put music to. 'Iko Iko' was like a victory chant that the Indians would shout. 'Jock-A-Mo' was a chant that was called when the Indians went into battle. I just put them together and made a song out of them. Really it was just like “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” …a phrase everyone in New Orleans knew.

Interviewer: Listeners wonder what 'Jock-A-Mo' means. Some music scholars say it translates in Mardi Gras Indian lingo as 'Kiss my ass,' and I've read where some think Jock-A-Mo was a court jester. What does it mean?

Crawford: I really don't know. (laughs)

So now, if you’re like me, you’re even more confused than you were when you thought it was just a nonsense lyric.

I’m a knowledgeable guy. But there are times when I’m hampered by the possibility that there’s someone out there who’s more knowledgeable than I am.

This is going to happen; there’s almost always someone more knowledgeable than you are. And there are going to be times when acknowledgment of that fact is going to help (I’m pretty sure it got me a job once), and other times when it’s going to hold you back.

There’s a concept in business known as the Peter Principle, which reads that an employee tends to get promoted to his level of incompetency. More specifically, a competent person will continue to get promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer competent. There they remain, unable to be promoted any further. This is something of which I’m hyper-aware; I don’t want to move beyond my own competency. However, I’m usually a quick study and, more often than not, can reach competency without too much difficulty. The hard part, for me, is being comfortable in that level of discomfort.

One of the things we experience throughout our lives, but rarely take the time to understand or to acknowledge, is the fact that you have to be bad at something before you can be good at it. Instant success is rare in this world, and if it comes then it wasn’t a challenge in the first place. So for me I think the question for the future needs to be not “What do I know about this?” but rather “How can I learn what I need to know about this?”

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Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live in a society of advice columns, experts and make-over shows. Without even knowing it, you can begin to believe someone knows better than you how to live your life. Someone might know a particular something better – like how to bake a three-layer molten coconut chocolate cake or how to build a website – but nobody else on the planet knows how to live your life better than you. (Although one or two people may think they do.) For today, trying asking yourself often, especially before you make a choice, “What do I know about this?”

I actually got a complaint yesterday that my posts have been very existential lately, because I’ve been working from the Emerson prompts, and why haven’t I told any fun stories like the one about the gasoline? So here’s a break in the existential action.

Yesterday when I got home I noticed a package still sitting on my doorstep, despite the fact that Wife and Wee One were already home. Why didn’t they bring it inside? I reached down to pick it up and discovered that it weighed nearly forty pounds, that’s why. Hey! My Father’s Day gift to myself had arrived!

Some of you know that I’m a fan of The Mike O’Meara Show, which was once a radio program and is now available as a daily podcast. (It’s still a radio show if you live in or near Coralville, Iowa.) The show is frequently sponsored by a product called the Mangrate, and between the chatter on the show, plus other positive things I’d heard, I decided that I was finally going to pull the trigger and get Mangrates for my grill. Also, I was engaging in a little retail therapy, but that’s for another post.

The Mangrates arrived in about three business days via Priority Mail (ordered Saturday, got them on Wednesday), and the only complaint I’d have about the shipping is that the tracking number they sent me didn’t work. But in the end, that’s a nit, right? If they hadn’t arrived, then I’d have a real complaint.

Because the Mangrates are cast iron, you have to season them before you can use them. I did this by spraying them with cooking spray and putting them in a 400-degree oven for an hour, then just shutting off the oven and waiting for them to cool back down to room temperature. At one point a few hours later, I opened the oven to take them out. I could touch the oven racks but not the grates, because they held the heat so well. The next day I took to the grill with my grates, and I’m just egotistical enough to have recorded it with my POS cell phone.

So here’s my “before” grill. The top rack is really rusty, which is why I have the foil up there. The main cooking rack is porcelain-coated iron, but the porcelain has started to chip and is beginning to rust. And, the porcelain flakes are GETTING ON MY FOOD. Furthermore, there’s all kinds of crud that’s fallen through the grate onto the heat plates and to the bed of the grill. It’s a mess. The grill brush is one of three I bought this season (because they were really cheap). It’s already starting to get the bent-down, flattened bristles. The spray bottle is plain water, which I use to hose down the flare-ups. But you know what the other bad thing is about having to hose down the flare-ups? Now you have a bunch of water in the grill and you’re essentially steaming your food, not barbecuing it.

These are the seasoned grates, before I put them on the grill. They’re meant to go atop the existing grate. I could have used a fifth grate; a sixth won’t quite fit.

My grill, like so many others, has “hot” and “cool” spots. Part of this experiment was to learn whether the Mangrates would eliminate this unfortunate phenomenon. I put a London Broil over a “hot” area of the grill. This steak was somewhere between refrigerator and room temperature. I confess I may have put it on a few minutes early; the steak didn’t sizzle much when it hit the grate, and I was able to touch a “cool” spot near the front. So, note for the future: give it a little more time than usual to get up to speed.

After six minutes I flipped the steak over (using tongs, not a fork, natch). Look at those grill marks. You can see that there’s a band where it’s a little more cooked on the outside; that’s over a gap in the heat shield. I was a little worried at this point that the heating wasn’t as even as I’d hoped it would be.

This was also the point where I threw on a frozen burger, in a typically “cool” area. I know, I’m a bad barbecue guy because I use frozen burger patties. But it’s my concession to convenience. Ordinarily, once the burger thaws on the grill I season it with a dash of Worcestershire sauce and a few shakes of something called Cavender’s All-Purpose Greek Seasoning. I love this stuff. It’s tough to find in this area, but when I’m in Florida (it’s plentiful near Tarpon Springs, go figure), I usually take the chance to stock up. I may just resort to buying it online, though. I didn’t take any more pics of the burger, so let me just note that the hot/cool experiment didn’t work out so well: the Mangrates don’t really eliminate those spots, but they do provide more overall even cooking. Go figure.

The finished steak, awaiting the last couple of minutes of me cooking the burger. That’s the second side you see; I’d flipped it again putting it on the rack. Again, great marks and a little bit of heat banding.

I should mention that the London Broil didn’t have a lot of dripping to do, which is the other reason I cooked a burger. Once I moved the steak to the top tray, I moved the burger to the hot area. Remember all those flare-ups I was talking about earlier? Gone. NONE. Not a one. The burger dripped plenty (as they do), but there were no flare-ups whatsoever and—AND—the burger remained juicy throughout. I cooked it all the way to Well Done and it remained juicy without overcooking on the outside.

The next important step in the Care and Feeding of Your Mangrates is brushing the grill clean. Remember the cheap grill brush I had before? Gone. This brush comes with your grates for free, though you pay a little extra for the shipping. I got a shot of it in my hand so you get some idea of the proportions involved. This ain’t yo momma’s grill brush. It’s also pretty good for getting dirt out from under your nails.

This is the grill, after I’d brushed it down. You can see that the area toward the back is already close to the traditional black you find on cast iron. I imagine the rest of the grates will approach that color before much longer.

The finished product, perfectly done. And while the banding (as I noted above) had me kind of worried, it was like this from end-to-end, all the way through. Everyone in the house agreed that this was all kinds of awesome steak. Except for Wife, who insists on well-done meat, so I threw hers in the microwave where it turned all gray and stuff, and it went “clunk” when it hit her plate and that was nasty.

So to recap, Mangrates are incredible. Go get some, now. If you’re a friend of mine of Facebook, I’ll experiment with a couple of other foods and report back there, but after one use I’m already a very happy customer. And to any Mike O’Meara fans who may have made it this far: Essadee!

June 10, 2011

Given Waldo’s definition of suicide below, I’m quite the suicidal fellow. However, this particular version of self-annihilation I’ve used as a springboard.

When I was at C. W. Post and working on my Master’s Degree, I was in a cohort with nine other students. Because we took all the same classes at the same time, we got to be quite the well-known little group among the Education Department staff, not to mention the Speech Department and a couple of others. And as we came to be a known element, we each slipped into our own roles within the group. One of us, the only other guy, was the rebel Bad Boy type. One was the Ivory Girl because she reminded you of the women in those commercials, a sort of fresh-scrubbed All-American type. One was the Mom (naturally). One was the Organizer, who set up the graduation party we threw ourselves.

One of our professors dubbed me The Divergent Thinker, because nobody knew what was going to come out of my mouth at any given time. I had this odd habit, and a “tell” which the others learned to watch for: I’d take a point from the lecture and start turning it over and over in my head, run it through a few permutations and then suddenly I’d have a question. Of course, it was several minutes later, so the question, while reasonable, usually felt as though it was out of the blue. My tell was that I’d start biting on my pen. Once I did that, I was told, they knew that my hand was about to go into the air.

This is still a habit of mine, although I’m learning to channel it into making my own work better. Start with the intention of imitating, then work it and massage it and make it into something a little more mine. By the time it’s popped back out, the originator would have very little idea that it was their own work that was the nucleus of what I’d presented. And while good writers borrow, and great writers steal outright, perhaps it’s time that I spent a little more time seeking the Original Me.

Write down in which areas of your life you have to overcome these suicidal tendencies of imitation, and how you can transform them into a newborn you – one that doesn’t hide its uniqueness, but thrives on it. There is a “divine idea which each of us represents” – which is yours?

June 07, 2011

Hey! Let go already! You’re allowed to say things. You’re allowed to express yourself. You’re in a safe place, at least when you’re at home. Relax a little bit. Maybe things will go a little more smoothly for you if you do.

Say your piece, but work on your diplomacy skills. There’s a fine line between candor and being abrasive. I still haven’t figured it out yet, but who knows. Maybe you will.

Good Luck!

Five Ahead:

I hope you think it was all worth it. All the bullshit, all the politics, all the general crap you put yourself through, and to what end? Was it worth it? Are you in a better place now than you were then? If it was, then good for you, I guess. If not, maybe something needs to change today. Or perhaps tomorrow. Heh. (That’s an inside joke to myself. Tomorrow I’ll know if it was funny.)

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There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

What would you say to the person you were five years ago? What will you say to the person you’ll be in five years?

June 06, 2011

I’m not an adventurer, not really, so it’s not as though I have any pressing need to, say, climb a mountain. Let’s face it, I get winded when I get up to answer the telephone. But I do want to see more of the world.

When I was a kid, I remember seeing an ad campaign that was pretty much everywhere. An image search wasn’t helpful, but in my memory there’s a kind of weathervane-looking object and the logo underneath: “See America First”. Apparently it was an outgrowth of a 1906 campaign that the train systems used to encourage travel to the West. I’m pretty comfortable with that idea. The United States is a pretty big place, after all: our climate runs from wintry most of the year to tropical; from lush growth to desert wilderness. I’ve seen a bunch of it, but I want to see more.

It’s kind of interesting to me how so many Americans are comfortable with traveling all over the USA but they get a little woozy at the idea of international travel. You’re going to Mexico? There’s so much to worry about, with the crime and the needing to know Spanish and all. It’s so different from, say, New York City. Heh. Africa? You need all those shots. Europe? You could find yourself driving on the LEFT. Canada? But, that’s like America, Junior. Even when it’s similar to us, we’re afraid that we might not be able to find a McDonald’s within a few blocks. That’s not really the case for me; I just want to see what else my nation has to offer.

I’ve been up and down the East Coast, thanks to my family’s Great Diaspora of the 1980s. I spent a weekend(!) in San Francisco; I think I’d like to go back there. I’ve been to southern Utah and at points in-between on the highway; I think I’d like to go again and actually be able to stay awhile here and there. I’d love to see Mount Rushmore and the still-in-progress Crazy Horse monument. I want to have a beer in Milwaukee, try to find the basement of the Alamo, have a steak in Kansas (Wife did this awhile back but she had it well-done, so it doesn’t count) and find out whether potatoes are all over the menus in Idaho the way crabs are in Maryland.

I need to devote more of my leisure time to this sort of thing; the overwhelming majority of my vacations are either to visit family or are quick “staycations” that do well for my budget but not my spirit.

That’s going to be a priority for me, before much more time has passed.

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If we live truly, we shall see truly. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not everyone wants to travel the world, but most people can identify at least one place in the world they’d like to visit before they die. Where is that place for you, and what will you do to make sure you get there?

June 05, 2011

Curiously, today’s prompt is something that I’ve been pondering for awhile. Of course, it’s been longer than a week so I’m all dead now and stuff, so what are you going to do.

There are so many obstacles that we perceive to be making it difficult for us to move forward with our aspirations—if only this, if I didn’t have to deal with that, if the other thing were more cooperative, if I knew someone in the business, if, if if if ififififififif.

But a lot of these obstacles are self-imposed. Not all of them, but certainly some of them. I think our lizard brains tend to hold us back with the little nagging “what if I fail?” fear. We think there’s far too much at stake: I could lose the house, my credit rating will suck, my family will disavow knowledge of me.

Thirty years ago, I had no house, no credit rating and a family I didn’t get along with very well. And it took several years before any of it improved. Was I in such a terrible place then? The higher we climb up life’s ladder, the more we feel it sway. It wasn’t swaying back then; I just wasn’t aware of it.

“Yes,” one might argue, “but you had your whole life ahead of you.”

All I have now is the life ahead of me. Everything else is just stuff.

The key is balance, and the maintaining thereof. What can I do to restore the balance to my life? I don’t think that’s going to be so difficult to figure out.

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Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you had one week left to live, would you still be doing what you’re doing now? In what areas of your life are you preparing to live? Take them off your To Do list and add them to a To Stop list. Resolve to only do what makes you come alive.

Bonus: How can your goals improve the present and not keep you in a perpetual “always something better” spiral?

The Cast

Our former next-door neighbors. Their given names begin with neither S nor B, although the names that everyone calls them do begin with S and B. Go figure.

Wee One

Wife's daughter, who is almost eighteen years old. An artist and aspiring actress who spends an inordinate amount of time getting physical therapy. She'll be starting college in the fall. We'll be in debtor's prison by the spring.

Daughter

My 25-year-old daughter, a college graduate from SUNY New Paltz and working in the world of theater, making props. Currently her work can be seen on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Durham, with the Playmakers.